Letters to Oneg Shabbat

I believe that understanding the Archive (not only in factual terms) requires tools that go beyond the historian’s toolkit. It may prove important how others outside the circle of those who edited and published the Oneg Shabbat’s work read it, people with different professional and life backgrounds. One would like to know what such a huge body of material means from a natural perspective (here I cite Susan Sontag),unmediated by established historical tenets and the academic restrictions incumbent on scholars. (...) Each of the texts is a separate whole in its own right. Each of the authors was given free rein to choose their topic as long as it related to the Archive. In my opinion, these essays are very valuable in themselves and, even more importantly, call upon us to read, if only a fragment of the Archive, a work whose immensity, richness, tension, and weight of recorded experience are simply overwhelming. Each of us has the capacity to read at least a fragment, a single journal or account. (Paweł Śpiewak)